The Elixir is for You, The Poison is for Me

#116 - The mighty river

After Kui left, Lu Jing first returned to the small village to bid farewell to the people from the Imperial City Division.

Yan Guangbo originally wanted to ask him where he had run off to, but Lu Jing made up a lie to smooth things over.

He said he had seen a suspicious figure nearby and chased after them for a while, but unfortunately, they got away.

Yan Guangbo didn't suspect anything upon hearing this, and only sighed.

"This rat plague came out of nowhere. I think it's likely not a natural disaster, but a man-made one. Earlier, Lao Yuan shouted something about a demonic woman, but he's dead now and can't point anyone out."

"But I think it's probably the work of the Demonic Path. Those guys have the most bizarre methods and the most sinister minds. We've caught a lot of them these days, so it's normal for them to want to retaliate."

Yan Guangbo took the wooden bucket handed to him by his subordinate and washed the blood off his hands.

"To be honest, Young Master Lu, my ancestors were actually outlaws, but since my grandfather's generation, we've been recruited by the imperial court. Now, three generations of my family have served in the Imperial City Division. Since we've taken this job, we've naturally been aware of this kind of thing for a long time, but I didn't expect it to implicate the innocent people in this village."

Lu Jing looked around upon hearing this, and saw that almost every villager he could see was injured.

Some were kneeling on the ground, crying loudly while holding the incomplete corpses of their loved ones. Others were like they had lost their minds, leaning against the wall without saying a word, seemingly unable to accept everything before them.

Even just now, the people from the Imperial City Division had rescued another surviving villager who wanted to hang himself, because six of the seven people in his family had been bitten to death by rats, leaving only him, and he had already lost the courage to live.

"You said Xiang Feixiong's reward is six thousand taels? Help me take out one thousand taels to distribute to the villagers," Lu Jing thought for a moment and said to Yan Guangbo, "So that the dead can be buried, and the living can start a new life."

"Young Master Lu is noble! In that case, I will also take out two years' worth of salary, making it a round number, six hundred taels of silver, combined with Young Master Lu's one thousand taels, to be distributed to the villagers in the name of the Lu Family Benevolent Hall," Yan Guangbo said.

At the end, he added with emotion, "The storm has risen. It seems that the peaceful days before are over… the world will probably be turbulent in the future."

Lu Jing's expression shifted upon hearing this. "Officer Yan, I remember you said before that the number of cases has been increasing recently?"

"That's right," Yan Guangbo nodded.

"Have you encountered anything as strange as tonight's rat plague?"

Yan Guangbo was stunned upon hearing this. "Now that you mention it, there have indeed been more strange cases than before. Not long ago, we encountered one where the victim died of suffocation, but during the autopsy, no signs of pinching could be found on his mouth, nose, or neck."

"But the cause of death was indeed suffocation. The coroner at the time was also very surprised, but later we received orders and the case was transferred to someone else, so we don't know what happened after that. Besides that, there is also a case of a village burned by heavenly fire that is also very famous in the department."

"But that's not our responsibility… There were many theories at the time, but they were mostly just speculation."

Lu Jing nodded, "Thank you for telling me, Officer Yan."

Yan Guangbo then looked at Lu Jing again, seemingly still regretting that Lu Jing was unwilling to join the Imperial City Division, but in the end, he didn't say anything more, just cupped his hands and bid farewell.

Without resting any longer, he and the other four subordinates took the bodies of Xiang Feixiong and the two colleagues and hurried north to find a ferry.

Lu Jing saw that the time for his inner energy to refresh was not far off, but he stayed in the village for a while longer.

He planned to use the 'Falling into the Mortal World' skill as usual to dissolve the remaining inner energy.

But what Lu Jing didn't expect was that he had just sat down and hadn't even opened the gourd yet when a muffled sound suddenly came from his dantian.

The next moment, an extremely powerful inner force suddenly surged upward from the Governor Vessel without warning, like a yellow dragon, soaring into the sky!

Lu Jing only felt an unprecedentedly intense burning sensation in his spine. Before he could react, a cracking sound came from the Forehead Apex point behind the Baihui point.

This was the sound of an acupoint being opened, and before the sound could fade, the Xinhui, Shangxing, Shenting, Yintang, Suliao, Shuigou, and Duiduan points behind it also cracked one after another!

Until the last point, Yinjiao, was also opened, Lu Jing couldn't help but raise his head and let out a long howl!

The howl startled the birds in the forest and even reached another village ten miles away, waking the people inside from their sleep!

Those villagers thought that some kind of beast had broken into their houses, and they went to grab hoes and firewood knives.

Then, that inner force continued unabated, rushing into the Conception Vessel from the Chengjiang point, forming a small cycle, and from then on, it flowed back and forth, like a滔滔river, never stopping!

And that wasn't the end of it.

A dumbfounded Lu Jing then discovered that the little bits of warmth that had previously poured into his limbs and bones were now emerging from their hiding places.

And after that, his face became very ugly.

Did I just advance to the first-rate realm?

Clearly, there were still nine acupoints left in the Governor Vessel. These were the nine insurance policies that Lu Jing had left behind to prevent accidents.

For two whole years, he hadn't tried to open a single acupoint.

He relied entirely on Falling into the Mortal World to get rid of the excess inner force.

But now, these nine insurance policies hadn't worked at all.

And the acupoints that were as solid as a rock before were now as easily pierced as white paper, and nine of them were pierced one after another in one go.

At the same time, Lu Jing could feel that his meridians had become thicker, and the speed of inner force circulation had also become faster!

In other words, after advancing to the first-rate realm, his inner force would recover at an astonishing rate.

Lu Jing was completely dumbfounded!

This kind of thing would probably be enough to make any martial artist ecstatic.

But for Lu Jing, it was nothing short of terrible news!

He had calculated everything so carefully, and had finally managed to stabilize his inner strength at the second-rate level, so that he could exhaust his inner force before the next day arrived.

He never expected that a bowl of rat tail soup would break his defenses!

Now, it was all over. After stepping into the first-rate realm, he didn't even need to circulate his energy, and his inner force would circulate on its own, becoming endless.

In other words, Lu Jing would no longer be able to completely exhaust his inner force on his own in the future.

He was still looking forward to what Kui had written on the wall about some great opportunity.

If he had known that this opportunity referred to this, then he would rather not have it!